With massive growth in the last year (600% according to compete.com) 70% of users joined in the last year.

With 35% of Twitter users having 10 or fewer followers and 9% of Twitter users not following anyone at all, many of the new followers may not understand how social networking works.

Many attempting to access this rapidly growing network often seem to expect the masses come rushing to hear their messages, however this environment is not for one way discussion – to be successful you’ve got to either have some real hot property that twitter users are going to be eager to follow or actively engage with the community.

Some simple rules for starting with Twitter:

Post at least a message a day to show people who visit your page you’re twitter account is active

Find others who have similar interests and follow them (don’t follow just anyone)

Only follow those who are active users – active users are more likely to follow you

Follow others in small chunks, keeping the gap between followers and followed no more than 200

Use friendorfollow to discover who you follow who does not follow you back

Re-post messages of interest, giving credit to the originator

to do this precede message with RT or Retweet ‘@theirtwittername’

Reply to messages of interest

to do this precede message with ‘@theirtwittername’

Send messages to those who follow you thanking them for their follow*

Follow those who follow you*

* Auto follow and auto notes to new followers can be done via SocialToo.